“Richard Avedon: Portraits”

Curatored by Maria Moris Hombourg and Mia Fineman

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Sept. 26,2002 – January 5, 2003

Black versus White, Again review by Tiara Buchanan

The Richard Avedon: Portraits exhibit currently running at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until January 5th chronicles the life’s work of one of the major American photographers of the 20th century. Best known for his signature celebrity and fashion portraits, Richard Avedon’s characteristic white backgrounds attempt to offer a deconstruction of the personality, or what the Met advertises as the development of an intensity of characterization not seen in photography before Avedon made his debut in the fashion world in the 1940′s.

What’s most interesting is the progression Avedon makes over the years, ideally striving towards a deeper understanding of the human condition. Much of his earlier work is characterized by deliberate posing, flushed lighting, and of course, the white background. These elements ultimately present icons to his audience, rather than actual people, and in the fashion world, what else do you expect It is when Avedon attempts to politicize his work and dabble into the art world that this kind of technique becomes problematic.

Two pieces that immediately struck me as indicative of Avedon’s aesthetic sensibility were the Andy Warhol and Members of the Factory and The Chicago Seven pieces. Both are large murals with full figures arranged at a lateral frieze, spread across several adjoining frames. What’s disturbing is how he treats both subjects with such detachment and lack of insight. They’re both completely predictable. In The Factory piece we see a line-up of strange, displaced, and dejected models in various degrees of disrobement and dishevelment.

One is apparently a hermaphrodite, while Andy Warhol, presumably the brains behind this particular art scene, appears only once, fully clothed. Avedon classically objectifies the models and presents them to us as vapid, soulless creatures barely in touch with their humanity which apparently can only be manifested through a grotesque critique of American sexuality – the old tragedy of the beautiful and empty. Avedon makes no attempt to define the figures as individuals and as you walk away from the mural you leave feeling the same as you did when you first approached it unsatisfied and bored.

The same results after viewing The Chicago Seven. In contrast to The Factory piece, these figures are well-known anti-war activists of the Vietnam era, devoted to the peace, socialist mindset, and revolution that marked that generation. The men are fully clothed in somber get-ups that serve only to reinforce our assumptions of what an activist or revolutionary should look like; tweed pants, practical collars, stern and idealistic facial expressions. Their poses all suggest suspended animation, an urgency that implies political involvement. Again, boring and nothing we haven’t seen before.

There are moments in the exhibit when Avedon seems to transcend stereotyping, as with the portraits of his wife or that of Jean Genet and Ezra Pound. But these are few and far between and it seems the only time he is able to give refreshing character to any of his subjects is when he knows them personally, as with his father, Jacob Israel Avedon. These portraits are what character depiction should be — startling, uncomfortable, and tender. They speak volumes of the conflicted relationship the two had, and the letter insert, included in the accompanying books at the close of the exhibit, from Avedon to his father reveals this further. In it he attempts to explain to his father what his idea of beauty is and while to some the photographs of his father may seem offensively stark, they are honest and heartfelt and you finally get a sense of Avedon’s emotional investment in his subject. This is where Avedon’s strength lies — his ability to understand and depict those closest to him accurately.

Consequently, those furthest from him and how he evidently identified himself in relation to them often in up as glazed over generalizations, as with his portrait of a former slave. The photograph features the headshot of a dark-skinned man with a white background and startling vacant eyes. The immediate word that pops into your mind is shell, as in this man has lost his humanity, is the victim of a cruel and barbaric institution and nothing else. His eyes stare back with the intensity of a wolf, hungry but ultimately hopeless. This was the most offensive piece I found in the exhibit and I found this pattern of unearthly detachment from many of his subjects, particularly Avedon’s Black subjects. It isn’t until the late 70′s that it seems Avedon realizes he’s photographing people, and even then his subjects rarely transcend the American stereotypes of the down home American boy, the pastoral Quaker tradition, or the modern age avant-garde cosmopolitan.

As an artist, Richard Avedon fails to break new ground, and instead has made a career of reinforcing old assumptions about the American identity. An identity that goes no further than us versus them, beauty versus brains, black versus white.

Zaha Hadid has had a good year. The London-based, Baghdad-born, endlessly controversial architect got a running start when she received the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 2004, graduating after years behind the scenes into a true art celebrity. Then the commissions started rolling in: the Aquatic Center for the 2012 Olympics in London, the Riverside Museum of Transport in Glasgow, and most recently, the new performing arts center in Abu Dhabi. The accolades have continued as well — Hadid sat alongside Edward Albee and Sandra Day O’Connor to receive an honorary degree from Yale last spring, and was named early this year as one of seven finalists for the 2007 Mies van der Rohe Award. But 2006 was the year that Zaha Hadid came rocketing into relevance, and her ascent was propelled in no small part by an enormous, career-spanning exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

Hadid herself oversaw the installation of the show, which began with a dazzling project from her early days in the public eye, simply entitled “The Peak.” To place a so-named work at the bottom of the Guggenheim’s six-story ramp is not just ironic; it takes an awful lot of nerve. That same nerve, however, is amply present in the piece itself, a 1982 design for a Hong Kong country club that has much more in common with the rocky mountaintop on which it sits than with the city it overlooks. Composed of platforms and ramps that run along too many different axes to count, the structure looks as if it could have simply burst out of the mountain one day. It is an event more than anobject, an explosion of shards and splinters that juts into space with near-defiant force.

Though it was the winning submission in the competition for which it was designed, and though it remains one of Hadid’s most widely-known, highly-regarded works, the Peak was never actually constructed.In the show, it was presented as a collection of paintings and miniatures, arranged in a small room set apart from the main concourse. The most striking and colorful of the numerous canvases showed Hong Kong from a skydiver’s view: an aerial spread with a harsh diagonal pitch that skewed the city into a million diamond-shaped streaks, as though the viewer were twisting and tumbling through the air. On the opposite wall, a smaller image depicted two divers brazenly vaulting backwards into a swimming pool on the deck of the club; it was a less chaotic scene than its counterpart, but still displayed the same anarchic disregard for perspective, practicality, and physical law. These details seemed incidental at first — only later, in the context of everything else there was to see, did the Peak emerge as the show’s quintessence, its statement of principle. What ultimately characterizes and even defines the work of Zaha Hadid is the bold rebuke of architectural convention — for better or worse.

Hadid’s work casts a wide net; museums, urban centers, residences, industrial complexes, government buildings, athletic facilities, and even entire cityscapes were represented in the show. Novel side projects were tossed in along the way to keep viewers on their toes: long, lacquered couches that streamed around the room like sluices of water; jagged hunks of foam to be used as the building blocks for custom parlor furniture; a podlike, tri-wheeled car straight out of Minority Report. Patrons who made it to the top of the ramp were treated to a supremely futuristic spectacle: a gleaming, white, hyper-intelligent kitchen with an integrated entertainment system, which read like a blueprint for the Apple corporation to corner the housewares market.

Taking in all six levels of the packed exhibition, though, was exhausting, and not just because of the climb. For a show about architecture, the most stark and substantial of the plastic arts, there was an awful lot of abstraction to deal with, since practically nothing in the sprawling retrospective actually existed. Scattered few and far between on the path to the top were photographs and videos of the handful of projects that Hadid has seen through to completion: a science museum in Wolfsburg, a car factory in Leipzig, a gallery in Cincinnati (her first American venture), and several others. But the rest of it, the other 95 percent, followed the rules of the Peak, presenting Hadid’s designs in the form of high-concept paintings, most of them stylized to the limits of intelligibility. Experiencing the show, then, put a bit of a strain on the mind: however intriguing one found the format, it was hard not to feel at least a little disoriented.

What, after all, was one even looking at? Hadid’s paintings, allegedly, are stand-ins for the usual appurtenances of architectural planning: floor plans, sections, isometric studies and the like. According to one of the plaques on the museum wall, Hadid has long dismissed such tools as “inadequate,” preferring to represent her projects in a way less pragmatic and more theoretical. After twenty or thirty paintings, though, one started to get the feeling that a little pragmatism couldn’t hurt. The images give little concrete indication of what a given structure is actually going to look like; their allegiance is much more to the initial vision than to the finished product. It’s certainly interesting to see so far inside the artist’s head, to bear witness to such raw, unprocessed thought — that is, at first. But by the time I left the museum, my stamina had long since been drained; I felt rather as though I’d been listening to someone describe a dream for two hours. Hadid refuses to meet her audience in the middle, keeping things as conceptual as possible until it’s time to start laying bricks. It would seem that whenever a project of hers is approved for construction, one must take the paintings as they are, miles removed their real-world futures, and simply hope for the best.

Admittedly, the results are sometimes staggering. The Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, a fascinating structure that has stood in central Cincinnatti since 2003, was amongst the stars of the show. It’s the first major American museum ever built by a woman, but to look at the thing, you couldn’t care less about the details.

On the ground level, the surrounding sidewalk reaches past the glass doors and deep into the building, then curves upward to make a seamless transition from floor to wall. Above that lies an impressive stack of blocks and prisms, massive sections of stone and glass that barely seem connected to one another. Through some inscrutable force of design, the slabs that compose the building almost appear to float in place. Describing the effect is naturally daunting; it’s hard enough just looking at the thing. I can scarcely help thinking of the doomsday spaceships from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which loom over the earth and its gaping denizens in the same way, if a bit more menacingly: “Motionless they hung,” writes Adams, “huge, heavy, steady in the sky, a blasphemy against nature. Many people went straight into shock as their minds tried to encompass what they were looking at. The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”

It’s hard not to be impressed by the Rosenthal Center. It is just as hard, however, not to feel even more impressed by the paintings that inspired it — crisscrossed grids of black and silver that constitute some of Hadid’s most visually rewarding work. Compared with these, the building itself seems oppressively heavy, uncomfortable with its three-dimensional form; the illusion feels somehow cheapened. This contrast typifies the dilemma of Hadid’s methods, whereby the paintings are so abstract, so airy, so concerned with their own aesthetic value, that their fleshed-out realizations can’t keep up. Suddenly, a very queasy question, one that has been lurking in the shadows all along, comes to light: what if these buildings haven’t been built because they were never meant to be? Perhaps the biggest part of what makes them so provocative, so strangely intriguing, is the fact that they could never really exist — at least not in any way that would preserve the magic and whimsy whence they were created.

It’s a frustrating conclusion, but it does stand to answer a few nagging side queries. Why, for example, would anyone expend the amount of time and effort that Hadid has clearly put into her paintings if, at the end of the day, no one could ever possibly use them to build anything? The show’s existence, let alone its installation at such an auspicious venue as the Guggenheim, presupposes that architecture has a place under the art umbrella; that much is clear. But architecture is still distinguished from the other visual arts in that its primary purpose is a functional one; the boundary has been tested before (see, for example, the Guggenheim itself), but a hierarchy of function over style has for the most part remained intact. So what are we to make of Hadid’s massive oeuvre of architectural plans, all of them infinitely more beautiful than useful? What criteria even exist to properly evaluate her work?

There’s another piece to this puzzle. Positioned midway through the Guggenheim show was a canvas grandiosely titled “The World (89 Degrees)”; Hadid completed it shortly after finishing work on the Peak, and it likewise remains one of her best-known pieces. The painting depicts a wide, sweeping terrain completely free of straight angles; even the horizon appears here as a broad curve. Dotting the landscape are buildings that share the skewed perspective of their surroundings: the same harsh slants, the same fluid forms. A closer look reveals that they are Hadid’s own designs.

It’s quite a dramatic collage, one that shows about as much respect for geography as Hadid’s other projects generally do for physics: the Irish Prime Minister’s house in Dublin, for example, sits in relative proximity to the Peak, even though the latter’s proposed site is 6,000 miles away in Hong Kong. Still, the bold juxtaposition is softened by how smoothly the structures integrate with their fictional environment; while any other setting would give away their strangeness by way of contrast, they are right at home in this warped “world,” where 89 degrees is as straight as it gets. The piece hammers home what the viewer may have already come to suspect: Zaha Hadid, through her work, re-imagines the entire world in her own image. What we see in her paintings is not the world we know; it’s Zahaland.

The image of the Peak that I found so striking was and is so for this same reason. Almost aggressive in its approach, it grabs the viewer and forces him to view things on its own terms, which are hectic and turbulent and never totally still. A god in her world, Hadid assumes total control over time as well as space: “Grand Buildings, Trafalgar Square” (another show highlight) washes from a sunny yellow on the right to a deep blue on the left, capturing a 24-hour period in a single frame. Countless paintings cram multiple perspectives of the same object onto one canvas. Massive structures are presented in a way that makes them hover in place, unaffected by gravity. The way of things is different here. Reality cannot hope to compete.

In a way, this is tremendously to the artist’s credit. She envisions a world with no practical parallels to our own, an alternate existence outside the realm of earthly possibility. Few adults are blessed with this kind of imaginative power, and fewer still can articulate their visions the way Hadid can with her paintings. The trouble arises when the boundary is crossed; the transition from fantasy to reality is always bumpy and awkward, the results always imperfect and incomplete. The buzz machine that made Hadid a star in 2006 hailed her as a “visionary architect.” I’d just as soon call her a visionary and leave it at that.

by Daoud Tyler-Ameen

The Rubin Museum of  Himalayan Art
138-154 West  Seventeenth Street
New York, NY  10011
(212)620-5000

www.rmanyc.org
The Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art is the most interesting new museum to open in New York City in a long, long, time. That the art is mostly very old does not detract from this. Although the museum calls itself “Himalayan,” most of the art on its six floors are thangkas, that is, Tibetan religious paintings. Other countries represented include  India,  Bhutan,  Sikkim, Mustang, and Nepal. But the style of the art is all of apiece. Therefore, and for other good reasons, it makes sense to think of it as Tibetan art. It is the largest collection of such art to be made available for public viewing certainly in New York City and possibly anywhere. I have been to this museum’s inaugural exhibit three times. It took two visits just to take in all of it.  The Rubin  Museum is truly a step forward in Western acquaintance with this kind of art. It is also a necessary step in what amounts to the Western preservation as well as dissemination of Tibetan culture which is being systematically eliminated from its primary home ground in what was once the independent country of  Tibet but which has, since 1959, been an annexed and militarily occupied  province of  China. Aside from widespread torture of monks and laypeople of Tibetan origins by the Chinese, the Chinese government has, in recent years, imported large numbers of ethnic Chinese people in an attempt to eventually outnumber the Tibetans on their own home ground. Due to this suppression of their culture, it is incredibly fortunate that Tibetan Buddhism has been taken up in the West by religiously interested persons. Although the Dalai Lama remains a wise and important figure, as well as an inspiration and a symbol, who truly hopes for the eventual liberation of Tibet, unless something happens to reverse what the Chinese are doing in the region, soon, in a few generations there may be little if anything left of Tibetan culture in the region which was its primary home. Although there have been several other small Tibetan museums and galleries in the  New York area devoted to this art, this is the first major museum of such a size devoted to it. It is thus welcome and interesting for many reasons.

According to a gentleman I spoke to from the Tibetan Buddhist meditation organization called Shambhala, the only major problem with the museum, at least for some persons, is that these paintings have been removed from their original mountings and turned into framed works of art whereas they were originally meant to aid and abet Tibetan Buddhist practices including meditations. When I asked an employee of the museum whether any Tibetan religious “teachings” would be given at The Rubin Museum, he said it was an art museum, not a place of worship. Nevertheless, I did notice cushions in front of some of the thangkas so that, presumably, those so inclined could use them for meditative purposes if they so chose. There is the question of whether that would be comfortable or advisable in a public place not meant for meditation, but it seems that as long as that possibility is acquiesced, it may be okay. The gentleman from Shambhala, whose name I have forgotten, said that this was a “minor” controversy but it seems important.

I should say that these kinds of paintings have been a part of my life for many years. I am a Buddhist, although a Southern or Theravadin Buddhist (India,  Sri Lanka,  Thailand,  Myanmar-Burma,  Vietnam,  Cambodia) rather than a Mahayana Buddhist (Tibet,  China,  Mongolia,  Korea, and  Japan). Although most of the basic teachings are essentially the same, there are significant enough differences that I never found myself using this kind of art for meditative purposes, although I have, on occasions, found the images Budhistically inspiring when I encountered them, first in India where I lived for three years studying Theravada and then on isolated occasions when I visited temporary shows of this art in places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, since I returned from Asia thirty years ago.

I am discussing this odd problem of religious versus secular uses of Tibetan iconography because I have encountered similar problems in other contexts. One of the places in which I lived for a long time in  India was home of the Gyuto  Tantric  College, a group renowned for their chanting of Tibetan texts and rituals.  I used to hear them often, along with other meditators in my tradition who happened to be my neighbors, then in Dalhousie, a town in the foothills of the Himalayas, eight thousand feet above sea level. Several years ago, the Gyuto monks appeared in New York at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine under the auspices of the World Music Institute.  Half of the audience was there for a religious event of deep meaning to them; the other half were there for an exotic concert. I experienced some vibrational discomfort at what appeared to be the commercial exploitation of something clearly beyond the materialism of the West and so did others. The musical tourists were blithely ignorant of what was going on except for the sonic experience. Nevertheless, the Buddha says that ignorance is the cause of all suffering, therefore…

I encountered a similar instance of religio-cultural confusion in a Christian context, also about five years ago or so. Because there had been an earthquake in the Italian region where Assisi is located, many of the saints relics believed in by some Christians but not by others, were moved for temporary safekeeping to America and put on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As I happened to be a volunteer working in the Museum at the time and a nonbeliever, I found it amusing to be looking at objects which claimed to be one of Mary Magdalene’s teeth, a thorn out of Christ’s final headgear, and many other such things. That Saint Francis’s blood was also featured smeared inside an open box seemed a little grisly but possibly genuine since he was located in Assisi and lived and died about eight hundred years ago rather than the 2,000 tumultuous years the Christ dated objects supposedly survived to be presented to us here.  Mostly, I viewed these objects with skeptical interest. One afternoon, however, I saw an attendant bring a lady in a wheelchair and press her up against the display case containing one of these objects.  Clearly the old lady who requested this action believed these objects to be endowed with some kind of healing power. If these relics are often used for this purpose, as I believe they are, it could be that the collective faith of these believers does endow these objects with some kind of healing power, psychologically or possibly even physically, just by their collective faith in it, or so it occurred to me at the time. However, most of the people viewing these holy relics were just taking a break from Picasso, Mantegna, or Manet in order to see what else the museum had to offer at that time. Of course, this was not my first encounter with religious objects treated as works of art. Many altarpieces and suchlike, which now fill museums of aesthetic reasons were originally intended as aids to Christian worship. One man’s Jesus could be another woman’s beautifully painted man with a beard. Tibetan art, iconography, and symbology are more complex than this but there is an interesting parallel in the public display of these images which, in the case of the old Christian lady, forced her to enact something in a secular, public place which was intended to be done in a church. Of course, the fact that these objects were being displayed in  America could have been her most convenient access to them, given her disability, so w not too surprising that she chose to test them out in public in the museum.

An organization called Tibet House, whose primary mission is the dissemination of Tibetan religious practices also has art exhibits from time to time. Some are “contemporary” art by living Tibetans; most are of thangkas such as those to be found in the  Rubin  Museum. Does that mean that the need for the meditative use of these marvelous images is covered? I don’t know. That there are hundreds of them on display at the RMA would suggest as much of an encyclopedic access to this kind of art as we are likely to ever see in this country (America, that is.)It is interesting that at least in the meditative context of a true practitioner, these many Buddhist deities and figures are taken to be symbols for internal, human qualities such as equanimity and compassion rather than as external deities to be worshipped. There is no capital G God in Buddhism, no little bearded man in the sky who looks down on everything that His believers do and communicates somehow his pleasure or displeasure, with their actions. Sin and guilt are not, strictly speaking, aspects of Buddhism either. There is merely good and bad karma, which are taken to be impersonal cause and effect events. Of course, there are higher or different forms of Christianity than what is proposed by George Bush, Jerry Falwell, and the like. In one fascinating book which I read at Christmas this year called The Cloud of Unknowing, written by an anonymous Christian British monk nearly a thousand years ago, God is taken to be “being” or “pure being” (but not necessarily “a pure being), in totality, as opposed to the idea of “being pure” which so many moralistic, hypocritical Fundamentalist Christians use to hit everyone over the psychic head who disagrees with them. How would one paint “pure being”, however?  Christian art mostly settles for the little guy in the sky, hoping that more intelligent followers won’t take the image literally. There are many images (including some of the thangkas in the Rubin) of Siddhartha Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha. I have heard that among lay believers, this image has been distorted to turn the Buddha into a kind of God to whom the faithful pray for a good marriage, successful lottery results, a good harvest, or whatever. Nevertheless, when the Buddha was asked whether or not there was/is a God, he replied that this was not an important question, what matters is how to resolve the sufferings of all sentient beings. That these beautiful images now residing, by the hundreds, in the  Rubin  Museum were once used by meditators in pursuit of that goal doesn’t detract from their aesthetic qualities. These paintings are beautiful and inspiring on their own terms, whether you see a green  Tara as a beautifully painted figure or as some kind of symbolic embodiment of compassion.  The Rubin  Museum is an enormous feast of these images, also including some from the Bon Religion (the religion which preceded Buddhism historically in  Tibet) as well as some Hindu images from  India and  Nepal. That these beautiful paintings may be new aesthetic territory for most of those who will see them here only makes this Museum even more interesting and valuable.

Big Lady (1993)

The Whitney Museum of American Art Madison Avenue at 75th Street
November 20, 2003 thru February 22, 2004

Review by Tom Savage

I’ve had so many notions/opinions of this artist’s work handed me before seeing it, en masse for the first time, at the Whitney that looking at it with some objective distance has involved an effort of intense self-mind-control. Some of these are my own preconceived (?) notions based upon seeing samples of his work in two Whitney Biennials. The work I saw there seemed retrograde and uninteresting — just imitations of Renaissance and Baroque art imagery with just enough current elements to make these paintings seem more than just reproductions or outright ripoffs. Well-executed but so are many heist movies, another boring genre currently visible everywhere for no conceivable reason other than the economic difficulties many Americans now find themselves in after a long recession now punctuated by the so-called “jobless recovery”. Within less than an hour of receiving this assignment to review Currin, I found myself engaged in an argument about his work with another young artist who was then showing his work in an annual show of Lincoln Center employees’ art in the gallery that occupies the basement of Avery Fisher Hall. This encounter and Peter Schjeldahl’s review of the current Currin show in the New Yorker reminded me that there are knowledgeable experts who think highly of Currin’s art, although Schjeldahl’s review ends, tellingly, with the words: “If his paintings are to be effectively countered, it must be by other, newer, better paintings.” This leaves open the possibility, even from one of Currin’s champions, that something better might come along.

Surprisingly, the first two things you see upon alighting from the elevator into the current Whitney show are two well-executed, realistic portraits, one of Mary O’Connel (1989), a young woman in her teens or twenties; the second is “Skinny Woman” (1992) of what looks to be a gray-haired dancer or one of those women who starve themselves in order to stay thin. Well-executed in a 19th Century, pre-photography sense, a la Courbet or Ingres, possibly, but not quite up to those masters, of course. Next, there is “Bottom” (1991) of a woman’s naked ass, legs (cut off above the knee level) and lower back. Okay, I think this bit of anatomy has been painted like this before but I can’t think of who rendered it thus. It reminds one of sculpture, although it’s a painting in Caucasian fleshtones surrounded inexplicably by brown covering the rest of the canvass. “Big Lady” (1993) looks somewhat like Lillian Hellman in her early later years. Her breasts, clothed this time) form a large bust that looks like some sort of cliff or something. A relatively formal portrait follows called “The Moved Over Lady”, a normal, middle aged woman in a brown shirt or raincoat. Her head tilted slightly, she looks happy. She occupies the left side of the canvass, thus, the “moved over” of the title, perhaps. Then there is “Ms. Omni”, another thin, this time bossy-looking sixties-ish woman, perhaps a fashion designer or an ad agency crow. This first room of Currin ends with “Bea Arthur Naked” to the waist, that is. Painted in 1991, it is honest without being offensive. Having recently seen the film “Calendar Girls” about a group of middle aged women who pose naked for a calendar in order to raise money for an English hospital, I see Ms. Arthur could have had a part in that film, although not the lead role played by the great stage actress Helen Mirren, whom I once saw out act Sir Ian McKellen in a just-post 9/11 performance of Strindbergh’s “Dance of Death”. Anyway, this digression is important and relevant to the art on view because both the film and some of the paintings in Currin’s show speak to the fact that we don’t know how to look at a naked or “nude” middle aged to elderly woman. Outside the gay world, nude men of that age are somewhat more accepted as subjects of portraiture.

A painting with the pretentious title “The Neverending Story” ends quickly enough. It’s either Abe Lincoln, Uncle Sam, or one of the Smith’s Brothers with a young woman scantily clad who has an arm around the man’s shoulder. In “Happy Lovers” we get a young, tall, bearded man and a shorter, unbearded lady, both fully clothed. She’s smiling; he looks tense. Who knows why? There are two nearby paintings both called “Girl In Bed.” The second one of these looks remotely like Marlene Dietrich in her late middle years, a sheet or blanket covers all but her head and a pillow. Oh, well. There’s a sick one called ” The Wizard” (1994) in which a fully clothed young man, eyes closed, made up a bit like a clown, with lipsticked lips and some weird black and yellow stuff on his eyebrows and eyelids. He has both hands on the large breasts of a naked young woman. All eyes are closed except ours (the viewers). Is this a tribute or a joke? If I owned this picture, I’d tire of it quickly. Calling auction, auction; white slavery for sale.

One nice painting is imply called “The Old Guy”. It’s of a gray bearded man, fully clothed, with a pink towel in his hand possibly in a washroom. It’s a truly good, interesting painting and neither sexually suspect nor a complete rip off of any other artist with whom I am familiar. In “The Dressmaker”, however, we’re back to Currin’s obsession with young, scantily-clad or naked women, this one in a bikini, holding a tape measure around a headless mannikin. A flower stands in for the mannikin’s head. We never knew before that Surrealism could be sentimentalized, but here it is. If this painting is trying to make a point, the next time I meet a dressmaker who actually looks like the young Sandra Dee, I’ll ask her what it is. The wall-note to “Anne Charlotte” invokes the name Botticelli to explain this painting’s classical look. Could be, though this is no Venus rising from anywhere. The feeling is French. The girl has brown hair. Would the Fifties or early Sixties Leslie Caron ever have been caught undressing for Mr. Currin? He wasn’t even born then, yet, I don’t think.

Next, we get a sexy, young woman in a ball gown holding a cane. The title of this work “The Cripple” makes it so offensive to me I don’t even want to look at it, being a disabled person myself. If Currin’s point is to allow yourself to have sex with your favorite disabled person, it still looks sick the way the girl seems to be trying to look like Julia Roberts or Jennifer Lopez. He certainly must know that for her, sexual discrimination is likely to take more than a bite into her cane.

After the weird nod or curious parody of disability, we encounter a perfectly lovely,innocent, well-painted (as close to Ingres or Vermeer as Currin is likely to ever get) girl wears a gown with a heart-shaped hole in her dress — or, more properly, the cliche heart shape of Valentine’s Day cards. This painting’s title, “Heartless” describes the painter perhaps but not his subject, as far as we can tell.

There follow several paintings of women with what appear to be painfully enlarged breasts and disintegrating faces. Syphilis, perhaps? I’m reminded slightly of a great Durer Christ in the Metropolitan Museum with a disintegrating face. However, this parallel must be coincidental. Still, since Currin is such a derivative painter, in so many instances, one finds oneself constantly looking for precedents. There is also an obnoxious painting here called “The Dream of the Doctor” with a doctor (face hidden), his patient invisible behind a screen that looks like a Catholic confession box. All we see is a large, discarded bra hanging over the wall of the screen behind which someone presumably sits. This looks like an adolescent’s wet dream to me. Since my favorite doctors happen to be gay men, it certainly isn’t their dream or any real doctor’s day dream, I suspect, while on the job. There is something about real doctors’ physical examinations which tend to make attraction and/or arousal extremely unlikely, a cold, objectivity perhaps necessary to diagnose any real physical problem. Perhaps this was one sick little fantasy that could have remained in Currin’s mind, where it obviously belongs. I move on.

In “Sno-bo” (1999) a woman with an enlarged belly stands nearly naked in some falling snow. This is an allusion to St. Christopher, according to the wall note. Even the Catholics have discarded St. Christopher, once the patron saint of travelers. Is his penalty for becoming a nonexistent, phony saint to be depicted as a female here?

Next, we reach a room of Currin’s Renaissance rip-offs I hated when I saw them by themselves at the Biennials. They’re always women, always nude, and always retrograde. If Currin’s work here represents a painterly neoclassicism parallel to classical music’s neoclassicism from between the two World Wars, I still have to ask why? Since, unlike Stravinsky, Currin preceded these with no great leap forward, why need he backtrack? He’s more like Jean Francaix (a competent, reactionary composer who wrote much beautiful music which sounded as if the twentieth century had never happened) than even a Frank Martin ( a wonderful Swiss composer who wrote neoclassical works possibly as great as Stravinsky’s). Once past this room of pseudo-plagiarized rubbish, things get better or at least more interesting.

In “Minerva” and “Two Guys” we get ordinary-looking people with neither obvious deformity nor enlarged body parts. Currin’s Minerva is a clothed woman with bad teeth. The “Two Guys” are what may be a moustached midget paired with a much larger, younger man. I was so glad to finally see some men in Currin’s sick little world (well-[painted but, in his own way as unreal as that awful, dishonest, overrated painter of magazine covers Norman Rockwell, who has been rehabilitated or habilitated by museum shows, recently.)

In “Buffet” (1999), we have the only sloppily painted image so far. It’s that of a Howd Doody lookalike man in back of a fully fleshed out man, both clothed. If Currin hates men, he could eliminate them completely from his little world. But then, of course, there would be no room left for him in it, either.

In the last room, there is (finally) one beautiful painting of two gloriously beautiful naked men (no frontal views, alas), their butts sticking out of a small boat. If Currin has a perfect or near-perfect painting, this is it. It’s called “Fishermen 2002″. Almost pornographic in the best sense, it’s a truly marvelous painting, reveling in young, male beauty. It would make a perfect adornment in any gay, male bedroom anywhere. One man’s hand holds a rope. The other’s head is just under a fish net that also looks like a spider’s web. This painting deserves to be reproduced. If Michelangelo, Gericault, or Delacroix could have let it (almost) all hang out, this might have been what it would have looked like. I’m glad Currin has one truly inspiring work — inspiring all of us to enjoy our bodies as well as old art. If not, why go to shows like this, at all? There’s also a flying, white bird and some unhappy looking caught fish in the boat. But this painting, at first look, suggests that if Currin can get beyond his obsession with naked women with distorted body parts, he might have an interesting future. That’s a big if, I’m afraid.

Fishermen (2002)

There is also a funny picture called “The Producer” (2002) of a young man in a fancy blue coat. Abandon women, Mr. Currin. They’re probably as tired of you as I am of looking at your fantasies about them. Men are your new frontier. Pursue it. It’s not as if you have to go to Mars in order to find them. I even forgot “The Raft of the Medusa”, which looks a bit like your beautiful painting of fishermen while looking at the work. It may or may not be a comment on that painting. But who cares?

When I looked at “The Fishermen” closely and sometime later at reproductions of it, I did notice several flaws in this work, alas. Wouldn’t these beautiful boys hurt their buns on the hard wood structures of this boat? Also, why is one preparing to throw a rope for some structure on an unseen dock or pier while the other is casting his net into the sea? Does the right body never know or understand what the left body is doing even though they stand in very close view of each other? Is this finally some sad agreement to between them to look but not to touch? Also, the bird, probably a seagull, is a cliche. No wonder the caught fish look so sad as well as caught. Lastly, these two beautiful young men find themselves in a very small boat. Is the man on the right crushing the genitalia or legs of the boy on the left? Also, their proportions, although stunning, are off. The boat is so small, there’s no room for their legs and feet in it. Still, it’s your best work by far, Mr. Currin, in that it conveys a sense of energy and true joy otherwise lacking from these realistic paintings.

Is it necessary to look backwards in order to paint realistic paintings? I don’t think so. I can think of two fine artists who’ve devoted their whole careers to realistic painting in a contemporary context and whose works are better than those on view in this show. They are Yvonne Jacquette and Rackstraw Downes. Jacquette paints things from aerial views and in odd angles. Downes finds scenes to paint heretofore not covered by realistic painting. Thus they innovate and paint perfect pictures as well without having to refer to some museum-preserved past, as does Mr. Currin. Nevertheless, no one can deny that Currin’s paintings are well-painted. Their sum total seems to be a narcissistic, self-involved dead end. But I could be wrong.

“Illuminate an Ancient Civilization”
Asia Society and Metropolitan Museum of Art
through Feb. 9, 2003

Review by Randi Hoffman

Two current museum shows in New York City feature ancient Chinese artwork, from landscapes where mountains and waterfalls render human beings inconsequential to playful clay sculptures of animals. “From Court to Caravan: Chinese Tomb Sculptures from the Collection of Anthony M. Solomon,” is an unusually fanciful exhibit running until Feb. 9, 2003, at the Asia Society. Chinese landscapes created over a span of a thousand years are on display at “Cultivated Landscapes: Reflections of Nature in Chinese Paintings from the Collection of Marie-Helene and Guy Weil,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, also through Feb. 9, 2003. The 40 ceramic tomb sculptures on view at the Asia Society were created from 206 B.C. through 908 A.D., during a period that begins with the biblical and Roman eras in the West, and runs through the beginning of the European Middle Ages. The sculptures include imaginary monsters, livestock such as cows, dogs and sheep, and men and women from many walks of life. The objects have the homey feel of folk art. They are not as monumental in scale or mood as the sculptures found in and around ancient Egyptian tombs. Most of the Chinese pieces are not more than a few feet high. The tomb sculptures never depict the usually elite deceased person, but represent people who exemplify different aspects of the lives of the interred. The sculptures where placed in the tombs to protect and serve the spirit of the person. The tombs were either sunk deep into the earth or cut into the sides of hills. Standing, Helmeted, Mustachioed Guardian Warrior,” is an example of a tomb sculpture from the 6th century. This wide-eyed, stiffly standing little man has a long beard fanning out like a flower. He is one of the figures with Central Asian rather than Chinese features. Along with the presence of several figures of camels in the exhibit, these sculptures reflect the influence of the trade of the Silk Road on Chinese society.

The exhibit includes a pair of fantasy creatures that look like lions with spiked spines, also from the 6th century, placed to guard the tomb. “Kneeling Female Figure Beating a Circular Drum on a Stand in the Form of a Kneeling Human with a Bird’s Beak,” is a much earlier piece, dating from the first century. The drum is red, and, as described in the title, it sits on the head of a female figure. A “Benevolent Warrior” has a peaceful expression, and has the aspect of a standing Buddha.

Cultivated Landscapes: Reflections of Nature in Chinese Paintings,” at the Metropolitan Museum, begins where the Asia Society Show leaves off. It covers the past thousand years of landscape painting in China, moving though many ancient dynasties into the 20th century. Made up of 75 works chosen from the Met’s permanent collection as well as newly acquired work, this exhibit possibly contains too much to be able to properly appreciate everything.

The landscapes are sophisticated, stylized and academic compared with the playful earthenware sculptures. The subject matter and style of painting change over the centuries to reflect evolving political situations. Painting styles change from highly symbolic and sedate to socially realistic landscapes completed under Communism.

The earliest landscapes in the exhibit are from the Northern Song dynasty, which ruled from 907 A.D. to 1127 A.D., a period of centralization and the ascension of scholarly officials over hereditary aristocrats. In this section, a long horizontal scroll tells the story of the seasons. Titled “Odes to the State of Bin: On the Seventh Month,” it depicts scenes of agricultural life, including picking mulberry leaves for silkworms and peasants cultivating fields.

In “Palace Banquet,” a vertical hanging scroll, people are shown dining in a pavilion in a beautiful garden. With the mannered garden, and everyone happy and prosperous, the garden can be seen as a metaphor for the well-ordered state.

During the Southern Song dynasty, from 1122 to 1279, more colors were used, and the paintings focused more on aesthetics. “Narcissus,” is an almost abstract, Matisse-like hand scroll of flowers, drawn by Zhoa Meng.

The Mongols conquered China and ruled during the Yuan Dynasty, from 1279 to 1368. During this period of living under foreign conquerors, many Chinese were barred from public service, and many artists and scholars retreated from public life to work under the Buddhists and Daoists. An especially beautiful representation of painting during this period is “Spring Clouds Over a Pine Studio,” completed in 1366 by Zhang Yu. The scroll shows a pavilion high in the mountains, almost in the clouds. Wilderness hermitages were often painted as a form of political isolation or protest, or more subtly, as an expression of sanctuary from a disintegrating social order.

Native Chinese rule returned during the 300-year Ming Dynasty, which governed from 1368 to 1644. An especially exquisite scroll is “Living Aloft: Master Liu’s Retreat,” by Wen Zhenming, drawn around 1543. It has a little house nestled high in the mountains, and is impressionistic and not quite realistic.

During the Qing Dynasty, from 1644 to 1911, Chinese artists adopted a realistic painting style introduced by Jesuit missionaries who came from Europe. Outside the court, individualistic painting styles thrived. “View of a Garden Villa,” from the 18th century, is a handscroll of ink and color on silk that gives a realistic depiction of an estate. Rocks were a favorite subject during this period. “Vertical Rock with Numerous Perforations,” is an off-white limestone sculpture of a rock, and “Red Friend,” painted in the 17th century by Lan Ying, is a huge scroll painting of a rock. This rock stands alone, it has no surroundings.

The last section of the exhibit contains work done from the 18th century to the middle of the 20th century. During the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, China’s rural life was deemed patriotic and politically correct, and the color red symbolized the new China. The 1972 hanging scroll, “Sunset Over the Plateaux Shaanxi,” by Shi Lu, has a mule train riding over a mountain path of red grasses. In 1960 the same artist painted “Mountain Rain is Coming,” of women in bright jackets carrying water. These country scenes of happily working simple people fall in with the official idealization of all that is pastoral.

Together, these two exhibits capture the playful, ancient side of Chinese culture in the Asia Society show, while the landscapes at the Metropolitan reflect the more mannered and symbolic aspects of art through different political regimes. At the Metropolitan, a few beautiful pieces would have been more effective than the entire collection.

2002 Randi Hoffman

“Modern Miniatures”
At the Asia Society

Art review by Randi Hoffman February 16, 2002

An Indian and a Pakistani woman who paint in the ancient illustrative form of Indian miniatures have collaborated in a rich, fascinating show, “Conversations with Traditions: Nilima Shiekh and Shahzia Sikander,” running through March 3rd at the Asia Society. Indian miniatures reached their peak of popularity in the Mogul courts of the 16th and 17th centuries. At that time, they told the stories of Hindu gods, kings, courtesans and the royal court. Shiekh and Sikander insert decidedly modern content into the structure, painting about forced migration, violence against women, art history, birth and death. The first pieces of the show are encountered before entering the actual exhibition. The Asia Society has a beautiful new building, and commissioned both women to create large scrolls to hang next to a circular staircase. Shahzia Sikander’s scroll “Midgets to Monsters,” combines sacred and profane themes, ancient Hindu gods and pop art symbols. At the bottom, the scroll reads “No Parking Anytime.” Above are birds, utensils, toys some Hindu gods and red concentric targets. Then near the top is a floating banner stating “You are Closer Than You Think.” Nilima Shiekh’s scroll, “Chenab 4,” is moving and breathtaking. It is a green sea teeming with abstract sea creatures. One-third of the way up is one of Sheikh’s signature images, a woman who looks like a tadpole, carrying a big, round object in her arms, perhaps, pottery, a gourd, or a child. The Chenab is a river in Northern India, Shiekh explains, and her scroll depicts the tragic folktale of a young woman who drowns in the river while trying to cross to visit her lover. She had used a baked earthenware pot to help her cross, but someone had tricked her into using an unbaked pot, and she drowned. Shiekh says she enjoyed working in the form of a scroll, as it is an Asian historical tradition, and is architecturally significant without being permanent like a mural, or outside and moving in the wind like a banner. Sheikh, in her fifties, was a representational painter in oils, and switched to painting in the more traditional miniature form. “I found working in an intimate scale on paper a very liberating experience,” she e-mailed from her home in New Delhi. “I could talk about things that would seem incongruous in a framed canvas on a wall. I still feel new avenues remain unexplored (in this medium), and that there is still a lot to be done.” One of the primary works of the exhibition is Sheikh’s “When Champa Grew Up,” which is comprised of twelve small, tempera on paper paintings that tell a true story. The first few show a happy young girl, playing on a swing and riding a bicycle. Then her marriage ceremony is shown, along with a flock of birds that symbolize her leaving her parents’ house. Next she is depicted naked and crying while working in the kitchen, maybe after being beaten. And in the final panels protray her funeral pyre, and women wailing in mourning. Sheikh used the story of a young woman who lived in her university neighborhood, who was given in an arranged marriage while still a minor, and then allegedly murdered by her husband’s family within a year. A kerosene stove in the kitchen was set on fire while she was inside. “I had wanted to talk about the dowry deaths I am confronted with daily in the newspapers, but had struggled to find a mode that could contain anguish without reducing it to a cliche,” explained Shiekh. “Champa grew up nearby, was the darling of her parents, and one day when I passed her parent’s house I came upon a group of women in ritualized mourning. It seemed inevitable that I would paint her story.” Shiekh explores a different kind of narrative in “River: Carrying Across, Leaving Behind.” The orange landscape with trees, roads and stairs that lead to a river is a representation of the passage from one land to another. The painting is an interpretation of the political partition of India in 1947, when Moslems were forced to move to Pakistan and Hindus living in Pakistan were forced to move to India. The transition was not a peaceful one, and between 200,000 and a million people died of malnutrition and disease. Families were divided, and murder, rape and theft were common on both sides as the populations traveled. “This painting is about the journey along a mountain river, now visible, now around the bend, sometimes close enough to touch,” says Shiekh. “It is about the transition from one time to another, one land to another.” Nilima Sheikh’s work is in the National Gallery of Modern Art in India, and she has exhibited in the Second Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane Australia and the First Johannesburg Biennale. Shahzia Sikander is in her thirties, and was born in Pakistan. She trained formally in miniature court painting at Pakistan’s National College of Art. When she wanted to study painting under Nilima Sheikh in India, she was denied a visa. So she studied painting at The Rhode Island School of Design instead. Her work has been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial and the Whitney Museum at Phillip Morris. At the Asia Society, her piece, “The Scroll,” shows an apartment house with the outside wall taken off. It offers a rear-window type view into the lives of many households. Some are single-person households and some are families. They are eating, watching television, or having family celebrations. Her most recent work uses computer technology to overlay images and textures. “Pleasure Pillars” is a collage of juxtaposed classical images of women, including a headless, one-armed Greek statue and several Indian dancing girls in profile. Thrown into the mix are a ram’s horns, a winding staircase, and clusters of dots. “Mind Games” is a similar juxtaposition with a masked ball, harlequin theme. “Art making is so much about creating your own world, your own language. It’s not about reinventing tradition,” says Sikander in a New York Times article. “Using this form has so much potential for subversion. I could learn the language and talk back to it. But I knew I had to master the craft in order to be creative.” Sikander enjoys process, and makes the smooth, translucent, ancient type of paper in her home. She uses pots of tea as a wash and rubs the paper smooth with a shell. The paint itself is a combination of pigment and vegetable dye. The exhibition, while not large, is laid out elegantly, with Shiekh’s work in the front room or two, then Sikander’s. The intensity of the content makes this small exhibition very complete. Sikander is experimenting with using ancient and state of the art techniques simultaneously. She has an intellectual, art historical approach, with interesting references to De Chirico and other surrealists, pop artists, and the use of pithy slogans like Barbara Kruger. While both are talented illustrators, Shiekh is more painterly and graceful. Her symbols are simpler and more profound, and her subject matter is more emotional. The twenty years more she has been painting show in the apparent ease and level of accomplishment in her work. Although from two nations at odds, “Shahzia and I have a lot to share, ” says Shiekh. “Our countries have a similar shared visual memory, language and history; and we believe that this sharing can have an instrumentality on the future.”